Résumé
An individual’s experience of voluntary movement is critical to shaping estimates of action outcomes and motor performance. The experience of voluntary movement is closely linked to a sense of agency, which can be experimentally assessed through the phenomenon of intentional binding. In neurotypical participants, intentional binding is observed as the perceived compression of time between a voluntary action and an associated perceptual event. Intentional binding, however, has been shown to be impaired in movement disorders including Parkinson’s disease (PD). The current study investigated the sense of agency in PD and explored potential relationships between sense of agency and impairments in motor imagery, interoception, and impulsivity. Participants with mild to moderate PD (N=7) completed an intentional binding task in which they estimated the time of either a voluntary key press or a consequent auditory tone. This implicit measure of sense of agency was collected alongside an explicit measure of agency (subjective judgement). Motor imagery vividness (state test), interoceptive awareness (state test), and impulsivity (state test) were also assessed. Preliminary results indicate no significant intentional binding effect, suggesting a reduced sense of agency in PD, as noted in previous literature. A correlation was identified between implicit and explicit sense of agency. Further, a correlation was identified between implicit sense of agency and impulsivity, but no association was found with motor imagery or interoception. Further analysis of data from a larger sample is needed to better understand these relationships in PD and neurotypical individuals.
